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[delicatefurysandwich-blog]

Freedom through constraint.

- my first ever blog written more than a year ago that I never posted - 

Let me start by saying that I like my job. I really like working, in fact. Or maybe I should say I like having a purpose, I like making a difference and I like having a goal to work towards.

At 28 I have already had the opportunity to not have to work and still be financially stable. This isn’t about some trust fund or inheritance, no, my job got moved and, working in a very socially protective country, I could either move with it or stay where I was, bereft of responsibilities to perform and yet financially secure, whilst I found something new and moved on to the next chapter. I hated it!

I anticipate that there will be plenty of people that will tell me what an opportunity it was and what a mistake I made to squander such a unique chance (I looked forward to this period of freedom, the doors it would unlock and the non-stop whirlwind of world travel plans and dreams of financial independence were dizzying). But then it actually happened and I hated it! The lack of purpose, the lack of external drive to do something that showed me elements of me I liked and disliked, that removal of a platform to develop and to grow that was now missing; it was like someone had removed a limb. It made me realise that I was not at the point to go it alone and I was certainly not at the point to decide for myself what I wanted to happen in my life. I didn’t feel ready.

Now this is me and I will only ever talk about me. I get that some people never want to be shackled by structure or corporations and that the thought of working for someone or something else is the absolute definition of personal failure. I Hope I understand that. This is because what I am also learning to understand is that personal development and realising who you are has to be that; it has to be personal. I grew up wanting to be a pilot and then I wanted to be a lawyer, then a businessman, then a pilot again. I grew up changing my mind about “who” I wanted to be. Then when I finally grew older (not the same as growing up, I have discovered), I realised that none of those dreams and aspirations were really about who I wanted to be; they were just part of it, they were a “what”. The who is so much simpler yet so much more complex.

I believe the who is an ever evolving concept. Sure, the basic foundations of who I am have come from my mum, my brother, my friends and those I experienced things with, the way I grew up and the things I saw and read and believed. Some of those things will change and some will remain engrained in my who. Finding how everything fits together, what stays and what goes and how it looks in the long term, in a way that makes me happy, now that is the challenge yet that is the opportunity that makes me the most excited.

Who I am, whilst potentially simple in the way it has somehow trans-consciously developed along with my experiences and choices, is the complex combination of all of these things plus the idea of where I want to be that I am not sure will ever be completely clear. What I know is that I want to be the best me I can be and I want to act based on what it is I want to achieve (as long as it is not deliberately to the detriment of others). But, for me, making choices that are somehow guided by the structure of others and by the rules of an organisation is allowing me to develop more than I ever thought possible. The influence of the external and the “limitations” of a job description make my growth as limitless as it has ever been. It’s a paradox I probably should have trouble to process but, for me, it works and, for me, that’s the most important thing.

x

[delicatefurysandwich-blog]

The very normal reality of a life-changing event

I have never married, had a child, nor lost someone in my immediate family (the classics, as it were), but I had always imagined that in that exact moment, you would be so wrapped up in a mix of apprehension and euphoria (or sadness) that you wouldn’t appreciate the gravity of what was happening to you until the dust had settled and you managed to look back on what you had just had emerged from, stuck in a long and solemn moment of deep reflection or the reveling in the feeling o give yourself a pat on the back for putting on a damn good performance in the ongoing performance that is life.

I feel like, right now, I am in the midst of my first real life-changing event and it’s far too normal and I am far too aware of it.

It is all slow motion; the kind of slow motion that makes you feel a director is over-indulging their need to draw out the suspense and you wonder if you’d have time to go the bathroom before the scene drew to an end and the story continued. Except in this example, I am both the weary actor portraying the protagonist and I am the incontinent audience member.

The director is disease. Probably.

Almost one year ago I went to the doctor with headaches and a throbbing behind the eyes that felt like my brain was a panic-stricken block of ice, trying to escape through the nearest emergency exit. I am not someone who has ever avoided going to doctors, nor do I feel I’m a hypochondriac, but in this case it took me a long time to talk myself out of the idea I was just suffering from headaches brought on by a lifestyle built around long working weeks and (sometimes) longer non-working weekends. By the time I dragged myself to the doctor, the headaches had turned into evenings laying in the dark, listening to soothing music, willing myself not to vomit. Come morning though the mist had always cleared and I could take myself off to work again, knowing I’d only have the occasional wobble or shake of the hand that would force me to make a joke of once again dropping something or bashing into the office furniture. At this stage I had already started to get used to various weird and wonderful symptoms and I still hadn’t been told something was wrong with me.

As I said though, from the very beginning I have been all too alert to what has been going on and of course I knew that how I felt on a daily basis wasn’t normal, nor was it going to leave of its own accord.

The first doctor was one who sits in the intellectually superior and far from charming category. His bedside manner was poor but it was obvious he knew what he was talking about and he sent me off for my first MRI. This was the start. It might be worth mentioning that I am not living in my home country and I do not speak the local language. Whilst the first doctor spoke a decent level of English, the one I saw when I got my results did not, resulting in me leaving the office, piece of paper in hand, with something scrawled across it, below the address of a local hospital: “? MS”.

Now, I didn’t go to a hospital that day. Instead I went back to work and pretended like nothing had happened. If I didn’t fully understand what was going on and what I had to do next then, in a way, nothing was going on and I had nothing to do next. But I knew. That evening I had friends come to stay and we went out. It wasn’t until the early hours of the following morning that I found myself sat in the sand opposite a pretty girl, blurting out the words: “I have MS.”

Technically that wasn’t (and still isn’t, but I’ll get to that) true. The doctor had seen the results of the two (yes, I had another one I didn’t mention before) MRIs and concluded that MS made sense but, due to the facilities available via the healthcare provider I was with, was unable to diagnose me any further, hence the address of the hospital and the ‘referral’.

By the time things got bad enough once more to think about getting myself to the hospital, I had been back to the healthcare provider and, via a doctor with a better command of English (by the way, I take full responsibility for living somewhere I don’t speak the language, you’ll never hear me complain about that), I understood the intentions of the previous doctor and the need for me to go and get some more extensive tests done.

After a day spent in A&E, I was admitted to the neurology ward and after one week of poking, prodding and scanning, I was discharged with the very similar (but more diagnostically-substantiated) news that it was “very likely” I was going to be diagnosed with MS at some point in the future.

I spent that week in the hospital bunked up with another guy in his twenties who had been suffering with symptoms of MS for 6 years, having been diagnosed after 3. Hearing from him about his experiences did not make me scared, it didn’t even make me feel sorry for him (although I really liked him and admired the way he was about it all), it just made me think about how that was going to be for me and how I would have to deal with it. There was none of the angst, the panic, or the sadness, not even any denial, I just remember thinking that, at some point in the future, there was a very high chance that things would be different. The realisation was very real and very… dull.

So that’s as far as the story is and, quite honestly, I’ve now run out of steam. I’m very like that; one moment awash with emotions and the need to blurt something out and the next I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about. But I’m going to fight my urge to send this entire page to the bin and I will post it. My aim is to keep channeling my more exuberant moments into this blog and see what comes out at the end. I think I’m hoping for some catharsis, even though most of the time I don’t even feel like that’s what I need.

Anyway, I am pretty sure I am going through a major change in my life and I am just hoping that, at some point, it starts to feel less real and I can have my Hollywood meltdown moment and the all important rise from the ashes on the other side of it.

x